What has emboldened Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to so brazenly criticize the new administration? Has Cheney lost his trademark sneer since he left the White House? All this and more in this clip from Wednesday’s “Daily Show” episode.

The door to bringing torturers to justice is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change.

Responding to reporters Tuesday, the president walked back from his “torture is a thing of the past” policy. While the administration still doesn’t want to hassle the good Germans who carried out torture, or even the superiors who ordered it, Obama said the Justice Department may go after the Bush lawyers who tried to legalize such abuses.

It is astonishing that someone who has proved in his memos to be so lacking in judgment and so ideologically twisted in his reasoning that he laid a blanket of legal immunity over those who wanted to torture now holds one of the most powerful and prestigious seats a lawyer can attain.

After President Obama announced that the CIA operatives who employed harsh interrogation methods (read: torture) on suspected terrorists during the Bush administration won’t be subject to legal repercussions, the Department of Justice made four “torture memos” publicly available on Thursday.

I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation’s great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the United States government. But that’s precisely what he did.

President Bush lamented Alberto Gonzales’ resignation and insisted that the “good name” of the attorney general had been besmirched for partisan purposes. Good name? Robert Scheer reviews the highlights (or, rather, the low points) of Gonzales’ tenure and looks at the troubling legacy he leaves behind.